1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to transmission and storage of digital information, and more particularly to a system and method for storing and forwarding audio and/or visual information for display on demand at a remote location.
2. Description of the Related Art
Viewing of various types of video programs has become increasingly popular. Typical video programs include motion pictures, entertainment produced for television as well as education and training programs. An extremely wide variety of programs have been designed or adapted for viewing on standard television sets.
Currently electromagnetic tapes of commercial movies are copied by the tens of thousands and distributed to a variety of users such as hotels, hospitals, stores, and other businesses, which is extremely labor-intensive and expensive to maintain. For example, a hotel plays a movie on its VCR system at specified starting times, and guests of the hotel desiring to watch the particular movie merely tune in at the designated time on the predetermined channel. If the guest tunes the room television to the movie, a charge is added to the room bill.
The logistics of movie tape distribution severely limits the number of movies which are economically feasible to show during any particular period of time. Most hotels play an average of eight movies each month due to limited capacity. Moreover, a videotape degrades each time it is played, so the quality of the picture noticeably deteriorates toward the end of the month.
In an effort to enable hotel guests to have video on demand, some suppliers have racked together numerous (normally 32-128 decks, depending on the number of rooms at a hotel) tape decks. Obviously, such an arrangement is quite labor intensive and expensive to maintain. Each tape deck contains an electromagnetic tape copy of a different movie which the on-site system activates when a guest requests to view the particular movie on their room television. However, if a guest from another room wishes to see the same movie at some time during the movie's playback, that guest is informed that the movie selected is currently unavailable, unless the guest wishes to join the movie in progress. If the guest chooses to join the movie in progress, they are still charged the full price for the movie as if they had viewed it in its entirety.
Similarly, a couple of multi-media platforms offer some form of limited video on demand or animation in a video form from a server. Nevertheless, these platforms not only fail to provide VHS resolution quality video programs, they tend to be quite expensive and lack an external interface enabling another computer or program to control such platforms' operation. Moreover, a new user often must wait until the platform returns to a particular setting in its program before it is ready for interaction with the new user.